7

MUM WAS ALONE in the room, praying to our ancestors and to God in three different languages. She knelt by the door, her kerchief partly covering her face, rubbing her palms together fervently.

‘Shut the door and come in,’ she said.

I went and sat on the bed. The intensity of her prayer overwhelmed the room. I listened to her calling for strength, pleading for Dad to get a good job, for us to find prosperity and contentment. She prayed that we should not die before our time, that we should live long enough for the good harvest, and that our suffering should turn into wisdom.

When she finished she stood up and came and sat beside me on the bed. She was silent. The space around her was full of energies. She asked about Madame Koto and I told her that people thought she was going mad. Mum laughed, till I told her what had happened. There was a long silence. Then I realised that she hadn’t been listening to me. Her eyes were distant.

‘Did you see the door?’ she asked suddenly, breaking out of her contemplation.

‘Our door?’

‘Yes.’

‘I did.’

‘Go and look again.’

I went out and looked but couldn’t see anything because of the darkness. The compound people, like figures in a red dream, milled about in the backyard, moved about the passage. I came back in.

‘Did you see?’

‘No.’

I took the candle, cupped my palm over a side of its flame, and went out again. Our door had been crudely hacked with machetes. They had almost splintered the wood. Gashes were long rather than deep on the door. A foul-smelling substance, glistening red under the candle-light, had been smeared across the wood in a set of menacing signs. Our door had been marked. I went back in.

‘Who did it?’

‘It was the landlord.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Dad challenged his party.’

Mum was silent for a moment. I put the candle back on the table.

‘Be careful of the compound people,’ she warned. ‘One day they are our friends and the next day they are our enemies.’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘I was cooking food. I came to the room. When I went back to the kitchen someone had poured water on the fire.’

We were silent.

‘I am now afraid to walk the compound at night. Who knows if they are poisoning our food, eh?’

I became afraid. I held on to Mum. She patted my head gently. For a moment I could see our door being broken down at night, while we slept. I saw the great monstrous Egungun, belching white smoke from seven ears, bursting into our room and devouring us all with his bloodied mouth.

‘Let’s run away,’ I said.

Mum laughed. Then she became serious. And for the first time I saw how the world had sharpened her features. Her cheekbones jutted out, her nose was pointed, her chin was sharp, and the two corners of her forehead stood out like the rock-shaped result of permanent bruising. Her eyes were narrowed as if they were endlessly trying to exclude most of what they saw.

‘Our destiny will protect us. Don’t fear anything, my son. The worst they can do is kill us.’ She paused.

Her face took on the bizarre immobility of a mask. Her eyes didn’t move and they seemed to stare past the window in an uncanny vacant concentration.

‘I am tired of this life anyway,’ she said, eventually. ‘I want to die.’

Suddenly I had a vision of her death. It came and went so fast and it left me perplexed. I remembered her face when she nearly died just after my homecoming. I remembered that it was because of her bruised face that I had chosen to live, to stay, in the confines of this world, and to break my pacts with my spirit companions. One of the many promises I made before birth was that I would make her happy. I had chosen to stay, now she wanted to die. I burst out crying. I threw myself on the floor and thrashed and wept. The demon of grief seized me completely. Mum tried to hold me, and console me, and find out why I had so suddenly begun crying. She didn’t know how inconsolable I was at that moment, because she didn’t know the cause of my grief. She didn’t know that the only thing that could make me stop was a promise from her that she would never die.

‘What’s wrong with you? Is it because of the door? Or the compound people? Or the landlord? Don’t be afraid. We are too strong for them.’

Her words came too late. I could not separate myself from unhappiness. I became my grief. I wept in advance for all the things that would happen, the unimaginable things beyond the horizon of all the narratives of our lives. Misery filled me like water fills a deep well after a heavy downpour. I started to choke. My spirit companions drank of my grief and filled me with sweet songs to make my wretchedness more sublime. My heart stopped beating. I froze, became rigid, didn’t breathe, my mouth open, eyes wide. Darkness rushed over me, a powerful wind from the forest. The darkness extinguished my consciousness.

But deep inside that darkness a counterwave, a rebellion of joy, stirred. It was a peaceful wave, breaking on the shores of my spirit. I heard soft voices singing and a very brilliant light came closer and closer to the centre of my forehead. And then suddenly, out of the centre of my forehead, an eye opened, and I saw this light to be the brightest, most beautiful thing in the world. It was terribly hot, but it did not burn. It was fearfully radiant, but it did not blind. As the light came closer, I became more afraid. Then my fear turned. The light went into the new eye and into my brain and roved around my spirit and moved in my veins and circulated in my blood and lodged itself in my heart. And my heart burned with a searing agony, as if it were being burnt to ashes within me. As I began to scream the pain reached its climax and a cool feeling of divine dew spread through me, making the reverse journey of the brilliant light, cooling its flaming passages, till it got back to the centre of my forehead, where it lingered, the feeling of a kiss for ever imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the dead can answer.